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Review successfully sent. Download our App. Download for Android. Download for iOS. Sign In Register. Facebook Google. Remember me Forgot your password? Other parts of the telephone network may require additional conversions, which can further degrade quality. For instance, international carriers sometimes compress voice data to stuff more calls through subsea cables rather than pay for additional capacity.

A couple of technologies already exist that can circumvent these choke points—or at least lessen the damage. Many new smartphones have one or both built in. But for you to use these enhancements to their full potential, carriers will have to make major network upgrades, which will take time and money.

One solution is HD voice. This transmission standard more than doubles the range of audio frequencies that represent speech, letting phone systems collect and relay signals from 50 to 7, Hz. At their healthiest, normal human ears can perceive frequencies as low as 20 Hz and as high as 20, Hz. But early telephone networks had limited bandwidth, and engineers decided that frequencies between and 3, Hz would be adequate for conveying intelligible speech.

By the s, however, acoustic researchers had demonstrated that people need to hear a wider range of wavelengths to fully understand speech. Frequencies above 3, Hz, for example, help listeners distinguish between some consonants. Likewise, names like Jeff and Jess sound the same on the phone. Believe me, I speak from experience. After the International Telecommunications Union standardized HD voice more than a quarter century ago, radio broadcasters were among the first adopters.

Today, they still use the technology to transmit remote interviews from a sports stadium or another studio over high-speed digital telephone lines. In my experience, the improvement in sound quality is striking. And others seem to agree. In laboratory tests at Nokia, for instance, users rated HD voice calls nearly a full point higher than standard voice calls on a five-point scale.

In September , in an unlikely test ground sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine—the country of Moldova—the wireless carrier Orange became the first company to launch HD voice on a cellular network. The technology has since spread around the world. According to the latest count, smartphone models support the standard, and mobile operators offer service in 73 countries.

But that situation almost never happens because the circuit-switched backbone still uses standard voice technology. Today, the majority of mobile calls, including HD traffic, are carried on a 2G or 3G network despite the widespread deployment of LTE technology. This newest cellular standard is the first generation to ferry data via Internet-style packet switching.

By compressing a voice call into a series of standardized packets that can travel between carriers and across national borders over an IP backbone, VoLTE eliminates the need to convert the data into different formats for different parts of the system. So no information is lost.

Packets can be lost or delayed, for example, when a network is busy, creating unintentional silences that can garble speech or cause callers to talk over one another. This unreliability helps explain why VoIP calls can sometimes sound great one minute and poor the next. In general, the quality of VoIP services has gotten better in recent years as broadband speeds have increased.

And some users have configured their private home or business networks to prioritize voice traffic over other data. Mobile operators want to control quality so that their customers will keep paying premium prices for cellular voice service. This control layer essentially acts as a traffic cop, opening fast lanes for voice data and other time-sensitive streams, such as video calls and online gaming.

The IMS prioritizes some types of traffic over others by assigning each data connection a single-digit code, called the QoS quality-of-service class identifier, or QCI. This number, which is stored in a routing table, describes the transmission requirements for the link, including the maximum packet latency, acceptable number of losses, and whether the network will guarantee a given bit rate. Voice calls, for example, get a QCI of 1, which ensures that By comparison, typical Internet traffic, such as e-mail and browsing data, receives the lowest-priority QCIs: 8 and 9.

Each router along the way can now usher packets into different transmission queues depending on their QCIs, preventing VoLTE packets, for example, from getting stuck in a Netflix traffic jam. More than smartphone models include the technology, and although the service is currently available from only 10 carriers, in Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and the United States, others are quickly getting on board.

Meanwhile, carriers are expanding their IP infrastructures, including backbone networks and local broadband links, which will let VoLTE packets flow seamlessly between mobile handsets and other IP phones, including computers and landlines. Voice quality should continue to improve as more networks support priority protocols and callers move onto the same packet-based system. Eventually, if the carriers get their way, the old circuit-switched networks will go dark.

There was a time when telephone operators took pride in their voice networks. But since the arrival of the smartphone era, carriers have been strangely—and frustratingly—mum about sound quality.

Could the tide be turning at last? Even the second-, third-, and fourth-largest U. Verizon, the top U. Jeff Hecht writes about lasers, optics, fiber optics, electronics, and communications. Trained in engineering and a life senior member of IEEE, he enjoys figuring out how laser, optical, and electronic systems work and explaining their applications and challenges.

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